I considered pounding him on the back, but was afraid that might kill him. So I just watched him heave and thought that if he died there, the colonel would ream my butt.
Pop’s coughing became a long, sustained ratcheting noise, and then he spat a watery black goo onto the tundra. He paused for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then heaved again, hacking out a second black glob. A third heave produced a little less, and then a fourth was almost dry.
Finally, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stood upright again. His face was pale, but his eyes were sharp.
“Water,” he said in a rasping voice.
I ran back to the jeep, stumbling and falling once on the way, and returned with a canteen. Pop took it without a word, drank, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“That’s better,” he said. He sounded almost like himself again. He capped the canteen and held it out without opening his eyes.
I took the canteen and fumbled to hang it from my belt. “What was that?” I asked. “What happened?” I was surprised at how shook-up my own voice sounded. God knew I’d seen worse things than what Pop had hacked up.
Pop opened his eyes. He looked amused. “ ‘What happened?’” he said. “Well, that was what we call coughing.”
I gave up on fixing the canteen to my belt and just held it clutched in one hand. “No, I mean, what was that stuff that came out?” I could still see it there on the tundra at our feet. It looked like it was pulsing.
“Just blood,” Pop said.
I shook my head. “No, it ain’t. I’ve seen blood.” I had, too. Plenty. But none of it had looked this black.
Pop glanced down at it. “You haven’t seen old blood,” he said. “If this were red, that would mean it was fresh, and I might have a problem. But this is just old news coming up.”
“Old news?” I asked.
“Tuberculosis, kid. I caught it during the previous war to end all wars. Don’t worry, though. You can’t catch it from me.”
I wasn’t worried about that. But I was confused. “If you were in the Great War, and you caught TB,” I said, “then how could they let you into the Army again?”
Pop grinned. Those bad false teeth had black flecks on them now. “Because they can’t win without me.” He gestured ahead. “Let’s get this over with, Private, whatever it is. I have to go back and start cracking the whip soon, or there might not be a newspaper tomorrow.”
So I turned and continued across the slope. I could see the hillock I’d marked with rocks a few dozen yards ahead. I hoped Pop wouldn’t go into another coughing fit once we crossed it.
V
Pop’s eyebrows rose when he saw the eagle, but otherwise it didn’t seem to faze him.
“Well, this is something different,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s what I thought, too.”
Pop gave a small chuckle. “I’m sure you did, Private.” He looked at me with his narrow-eyed gaze, but this time it was more quizzical than annoyed. “When I asked you what this was about, you said it would be better if you just showed me. Now you’ve shown me. So what the hell does the lieutenant colonel want me to do? Write this up for The Adakian?”
“I think that’s the last thing he wants,” I said. “He says this thing could hurt morale.”
Pop rolled his eyes skyward. “Christ, it’s probably low morale in the form of sheer boredom that did this in the first place. Human beings are capable of performing any number of deranged and pointless acts to amuse themselves. Which is precisely what we have here. The brass told us we couldn’t shoot the goddamn ravens, so some frustrated boys came up here and managed to cut up a bald eagle instead. And they’ve expressed their personal displeasure with their military service by setting up the carcass as a perverse mockery of the Great Seal of the United States.”
“The what?” I asked.
Pop pointed down at the bird. “There’s no olive branch or arrows. But otherwise, that’s what this looks like. The Great Seal. Aside from the evisceration, of course. But I suppose that was just boys being boys.”
“You think it was more than one guy?” I asked.
Pop looked at me as if I were nuts. “How on earth would I know?”
“You said ‘boys.’ That means more than one.”
“I was speculating. I have no idea whether this was a project for one man, or twenty.”
I tossed the canteen from hand to hand. “Okay, well, do whatever you have to do to figure out who it was.”
Now Pop looked at me as if I weren’t only nuts, but nuts and stupid, too. “There’s no way of knowing who did this. Or even why. Speculation is all that’s possible. The bird might have been killed out of boredom, out of hatred, or even out of superstition. I have no idea.”
None of that sounded like something I could report. “But the colonel says you used to be a detective. Before you wrote the books.”
Pop took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was a Pinkerton. Not Sherlock Holmes. A Pinkerton can’t look at a crime scene and deduce a culprit’s name, occupation, and sock color. Usually, a Pinkerton simply shadows a subject. Then, if he’s lucky, the subject misbehaves and can be caught in the act.” Pop put his glasses back on and held out his empty hands. “But there’s no one to shadow here, unless it’s every one of the twenty thousand men down in camp. Do you have one in mind? If not, there’s nothing to be done.”
I looked down at the eagle. As big and magnificent as it might have been in life, it was just a dead bird now. What had happened here was strange and ugly, but it wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t as if a human being had been staked out and gutted.
But in its way, the eagle unnerved me almost as much as the things I’d seen and done on Attu. At least there had been reasons for the things on Attu. Here, there was no reason at all—unless Pop was right, and it had just been boredom. If that was the case, I didn’t want to know which guys had been bored enough to do this. Because if I knew, I might get mad enough to hurt them. And then there’d be something else I’d have to see in my sleep over and over again.
“All right, Pop,” I said, keeping my eyes on the eagle. “There’s a can of gasoline strapped to the jeep. What if we tell the colonel that when you and I got up here, we found this thing burned up?”
Pop cleared his throat. “You’d be willing to do that, Private? Lie to the lieutenant colonel?”
I had never sidestepped an order before. The colonel had made me do some stupid things and some awful things, but this was the first time that it looked like he was making me do a pointless thing. Besides, Pop was older and smarter than the colonel—even I could see that—and if he thought the eagle was a waste of time, then it probably was.
Besides, we were enlisted men, and we had to stick together. As long as there weren’t any officers around to catch us doing it.
“Sure,” I said, looking up at Pop again. “I’ve lied before. Back home in Nebraska, I even lied to a judge.”
Pop gave me a thin-lipped smile. “What did you do to wind up in front of a judge?”
I had done so much worse since then that it didn’t seem like much of a fuss anymore. “I beat up a rich kid from Omaha for calling me a dumb Bohunk,” I said. “Then I stole his Hudson, drove it into a pasture, and chased some cows. I might have run it through a few fences while I was at it.”
Pop chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Some judges might have even considered it justified.”
“Well, I also socked the first deputy who tried to arrest me,” I said. “But I think what really made the judge mad was when I claimed that I wasn’t a dumb Bohunk, but a stupid Polack.”